UC Irvine

When writing on the lives of Africans and their descendants, the scholarship of colonial and revolutionary Río de la Plata has focused mainly on manumission and freedom, slave labor in the city and the countryside, gender, culture, and military participation. Few works examine the African experiences in the slave trade routes leading to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This chapter examines how the transatlantic trade to the Río de la Plata, and its continuation toward Lima, shaped the captives’ experiences. This chapter also offers a brief examination of rebellions in slave vessels, given that the historiography of slavery in the Río de la Plata rarely surveys these instances. Different patterns of the traffic should not obscure that violence determined the everyday life of the enslaved. Violence expressed by death, disease, and starvation shaped the experiences of those who endured the itineraries from inland regions to the African littoral, and from there to the Río de la Plata (or Brazil), often to continue to Lima.